Cc City Imagination And Cultural Identity Of The Novel

Xixi (1938-), a famous representative writer of Hong Kong, formerly known as Zhang Yan, was born in Zhongshan, Guangdong. She moved with her family from Shanghai to Hong Kong in1950s. Since Xixi is a prolific writer with avant-garde pioneer writing style and is famous for her way of varieties over her writing skills, she has a high reputation in Hong Kong and Taiwan academia. Though Xixi is an immigrant to Hong Kong, she has a strong cultural identity of the city. She became a typical writer of local awareness of Hong Kong through her personal experiences and cultural identity. In her works of different forms and different styles, the city itself has always been an important theme. The city imagination in Xixi’s works usually have a lot of the same characteristics or qualities as Hong Kong, however, there’s the intention to distinguish the reality Hong Kong and the imagined city she creates. This article will analyze the text of Xixi’s novel using the theoretical tool of the concept of Stuart Hall’s "cultural identity" and Calvino’s Poetic theory, then investigate how Xixi has built the imagined "’text city" by her writing and identify the cultural identity, and elaborate the trend of the change of her works in the different periods.The thesis will focus on the five important novels of Xixi:"My City","Beautiful Building","Marvels of a Floating City","The Fertile Town Chalk Circle" and "Flying Carpet". Xixi’s works will be divided into three periods in three corresponding chapters in chronological order. The first chapter is devoted to the "My City" and "Beautiful Building" novels written in1970s. The residents of "My City" although confines to only have "City Identity" which embarrassing the identity of their own, indicate the initial establishment of a "local awareness". The second chapter is devoted to the1980s works of "Marvels of a Floating City" and "The Fertile Town Chalk Circle". These two novels showed Xixi’s concern about the fate of the "floating city" and anxious about the "lost city" after the major event of China and England signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration. Chapter3discourses Xixi’s novel "Flying Carpet" written just before1997, which no longer entangled in the political disputes of right and wrong, but tried rebuilding the "cultural identity" through the rewriting of history, put the utopian ideal into the blessing to the city, which witnessed the local awareness into a new stage of maturity. The conclusion part introduced the works of Xixi after1997briefly and reviewed the trend of Xixi’s change of thought in the different periods of her works about city theme.